Monday, July 10, 2017

Gareth Stedman Jones's Marx

I was so irritated by the review of Gareth Stedman Jones’
Marx “biography” in the London Book Review that I began to research GSJ’s past
pronunciamentos in re the great man. Jones has been treading high road to
capitalism for a long long time. But he has the misfortune, or fortune, to have
linked himself early to Marx. Instead of disavowing Marx and moving on, he’s
dedicated himself to the more remunerative task of misinterpreting Karl. As was
pointed out in 2004 by Jacob Stevens, fascinated by Jones’s long yawp of an intro to the Penguin edition of The
Communist Manifesto, Jones’s Marx is
recognizably a product of one of the Cold War subthemes in the “battle of ideas”:
that Marxism is a religion. Hence, the title of the book of confessions by ex-Commies:
The God that Failed. Jones’s variant is that Marx knew very well that ideas
rock the world, but hid this under a materialism that was in stark contradiction
to his humanist faith.

In making this case, Jones embraces the idea that
intellectual history is pretty much about reading books. Marx reads some books,
is influenced, writes books, etc. etc.

It is a case he has been making for some time. For instance,
in 2002, writing for the Guardian, Jones casts cold water on the anarchos and
lefties making with the cops at globalist fests – like G20 summits – by way of
another Cold War trope – capitalism did everything that Marx wanted communism
to do! In 2002, it was very popular for ex-lefties to make arguments of this
form. Hence Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens making mock of the betrayal of
the “left” by those who opposed the crusade for all that was right and good in
Iraq.

Jones did not go that far, although the Blairist butter in
his Guardian article is pretty thick. But what bugs me about Jones is not so
much his politics – which is a garden variety of bien-pensant reformism, which
in the short term is what we got – as his historical method. For instance,
this:

“Marx’s manifesto vision was driven by a conviction that the
capitalist cash-nexus distorted the expression of human need. Drawing upon
legal historians, he concluded the modern forms of private property and the
exchange economy based upon it was only one in a historical succession of
different property forms. Capitalist private property had produced the unparalleled
productivity gains of the 19th century industrial revolution.”

This to my mind ignores the Marx who did not have to read
German legal historians to see what was going on about him as he lived and
worked in Cologne. All he had to do was read the newspaper he edited. Jones
simply ignores the series of newspaper articles Marx wrote about the laws
concerning the abolition of traditional gleaning rights in the woods that
formed an important part of the wealth of the German landowner aristocracy. How
important was this issue? Wood theft constituted the highest percentage of the
crimes for which people were sentenced to prison in Germany in the nineteenth
century. It was while working on his newspaper that Marx saw the belief he’d
been educated in – that law makes property – was untrue. Rather property law
was being remade by class. Although Jones has evidently had his head in a
library for a long long time, he might have stuck it out enough to notice how
intellectual property laws have again remade property. This was not in response
to some principle in the law, but rather to some pressure from the owners of
computer software and giant pharma. You can sell your car second hand – you can’t
do the same with your code for your Microsoft Office Suite. Rationalization isn't reason - the capitalist libido operates now just as it operated in the forests around Cologne in 1845.

All of which is a way of saying: Marx noticed things outside of books. He noticed events.
Jones is correct that the critique of capitalism was never succeeded by the
construction of some positive communist utopia, with instructions showing how part
a fits into slot b. On the other hand, what promoter of capitalism ever
envisioned global warming? Or had a grasp of the vast effects of unleashing the
chemical-industrial products on this world? Did the inventor of nitrogen fertilizer
have any sense that he was igniting a population boom, and destroying peasant
societies globally – more effectually than communism ever did?

All of these overwhelming effects of the system can be
abbreviated into the term “alienation.” It is what we live in. Marx’s critique gives
us a mirror of how it came about, and how it functions. It is based not on
reading the British economists and the German legal historians – these were
useful, but not sufficient – but on reading newspapers, reports on factory
conditions, going out into the streets. Marx was perhaps the first philosopher
to ever take what the newspaper reported as material for thought.

You’d never know that from an intellectual archaeology that
refuses to look at the nineteenth century except in the cliched terms of “the
industrial revolution” – a sort of children’s book caption for what was
happening. A more serious issue might be Jones’s substitute of private property
relations for wage labor. Which is what Marx was on about at the time he wrote
the Manifesto, and immediately afterwards, when he edited – wait for it – a newspaper,
and made speeches to workers organizations, such as the one in Vienna in 1848,
on the theory of property by Puffendorf. Just kidding! The speeches were on
wage labor, and were reprinted in a pamphlet, and referred to the wages made by
weavers, for instance. It referred to the worker’s time – his or her living
time.

Here’s a quote, ending with a perfect little metaphor. And
then I’m done with the bug up my ass that succeeded my reading of that stupid
review in the LRB.

“But the putting of labor-power into action -- i.e., the
work -- is the active expression of the laborer's own life. And this life
activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of
life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own
existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labor itself
as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity
that he has auctioned off to another. The product of his activity, therefore,
is not the aim of his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk
that he weaves, not the gold that he draws up the mining shaft, not the palace
that he builds. What he produces for himself is wages ; and the silk, the gold,
and the palace are resolved for him into a certain quantity of necessaries of
life, perhaps into a cotton jacket, into copper coins, and into a basement
dwelling. And the laborer who for 12 hours long, weaves, spins, bores, turns,
builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries hods, and so on -- is this 12 hours'
weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shovelling, stone-breaking,
regarded by him as a manifestation of life, as life? Quite the contrary. Life
for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed.
The 12 hours' work, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving,
spinning, boring, and so on, but only as earnings, which enable him to sit down
at a table, to take his seat in the tavern, and to lie down in a bed. If the
silk-worm's object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it
would be a perfect example of a wage-worker.“

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.